The 2022 World Water theme is groundwater. Water, but especially groundwater, is scarce and getting scarcer in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
I recently reflected on some articles I stumbled across about the marshes in Iraq. I don’t know whether to be pessimistic, or not, but given our ability to address other commons problems I’m leaning pessimistic.
These articles caused me to reflect on a project I have involved in over the last few years on groundwater management in central and southern Tunisia that has many similar characteristics.
Professionally these are fascinating problems.
Fundamentally these are common resource management problems for which the nature of the problem and the general solution approach are well known – even if the devil is in the details.
I find that a systems thinking approach is really very helpful to understanding the problem – which in the case of Tunisia are really threefold:
- Limits to Growth: The absolute limit of the underlying resource – in this case groundwater availability;
- Tragedy of the Commons: The commons characteristics of that resource – notably the difficulty in controlling access to the resource and the strong incentives for individual actors to maximize their use; and,
- Success to the Successful: The unequal ability of different social strata to adapt to changing availability.
One of the real challenges (question if you will) is whether and when to take the leap from systems thinking to systems dynamics – to make the leap to quantitative modeling. Not sure I really have an answer to that.
One of the mental stumbling blocks that I have is how simple can the conceptual model be, and can the quantitative model also be (reasonably simple). How detailed is detailed enough and fit for purpose?
Consultants, and truth be told I rarely do this work directly, will tend towards complexity in my experience. Also working in inter-disciplinary teams also helps drive increases in complexity. Yet, one of the critical strengths of systems approaches is the ability to be able to distill complexity into (simpler) stories that can be more widely understood – by experts and non-experts alike.